A hardware implementation of real-time video deblocking using shifted thresholding

Video compression has become very important as demand has increased for the storage and transmission of digital video content. Popular video compression schemes like MPEG encoding make use of block-transform coding techniques which are susceptible to blocking artifacts. Recently, an efficient deblocking algorithm based on the concept of shifted thresholding has been proposed. This algorithm uses only integer arithmetic and replaces division operations with bit shifting. This paper proposes a new hardware architecture for the implementation of video deblocking using shifted thresholding. A prototype system for high performance video deblocking using a FPGA (field programmable gate array) board is described. The prototype system leverages the reduced hardware complexity of the shifted thresholding algorithm to cost-effectively implement video deblocking on a FPGA board.